Right of Bang: Surviving the PTSD Aftermath of Crisis

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If you’ve spent any time in the prepping world, you’ve thought long and hard about the X. The event. The disaster. The fight. The day it all goes sideways.

You’ve worked on plans to get through it—the food, the water, the gear, the skills. Good. That’s the work.

But here’s the question almost nobody preps for: what happens to your mind after you make it through?

That’s the heart of my conversation with Kris Hasenauer on episode 308 of the Mind4Survival podcast. Kris is a former Green Beret with the 20th Special Forces Group who is now a physician assistant and doctor of behavioral medicine. He’s also the founder of Operation Field Trip, an organization that gets veterans and first responders the help they need.

His message is simple, and it stuck with me: surviving the incident is only half the battle. The aftermath is the part that takes people out—and sometimes it does so years later.

TL;DR: “Right of bang” is everything that happens after a hard event, including mental and emotional recovery. Surviving the incident is only half the job. The aftermath often arrives years later and can’t be willpowered away. Build resilience as a skill before you need it, treat trauma as an injury to manage with the right tools, and know where to turn ahead of time.

Left of Bang, Right of Bang

A lot of you know the book Left of Bang. Left of bang is everything you do before the moment hits—the awareness, the reading of a situation, the decisions that keep you out of trouble in the first place. Most of prepping lives there. We’re a left-of-bang crowd by nature.

Right of bang is what comes after. It’s the part where you’ve already been through the hard thing, and now you have to keep living.

The trauma we pick up going through life—the wreck, the loss, the violence, the long grind of stress—that’s a right-of-bang problem. And it’s the layer that gets skipped. We plan for the event down to the last detail and leave the recovery to chance.

That gap is what this episode is about.

You Can’t Willpower Your Way Through the Aftermath

In the military, you train battle drills until they’re automatic. Kris calls them algorithms — a set sequence that lets you make a decision in a moment of stress without thinking it through. That’s by design, and it works.

The aftermath doesn’t work that way.

There’s no battle drill for grief. No ten-step checklist that resets your nervous system. As Kris put it, the aftermath takes logical, synchronized thought, and there’s no algorithm for that. You can’t tell someone to take ten deep breaths, sit in a dark room, and expect to come out the other side fixed.

You can and should have a plan. It can’t be reduced just to a drill.

Kris uses a comparison that lands hard for anyone with a medical background. Think of the immediate response as a behavioral-health tourniquet. When something just happened to you, the goal is to stop the bleeding and get you stable. That might mean a hard conversation. It might even mean medication for a stretch.

But a tourniquet is a short-term tool. Leave one on too long, and you lose the limb. The same is true here. Reaching for one fix and white-knuckling it for the next thirty years isn’t a plan—it’s a slow loss.

When Your Normal Is the Redline

Here’s a piece of the conversation I keep coming back to.

For a lot of us who’ve lived at full throttle, our version of normal is the redline. We tell ourselves that chaos makes our minds go quiet. Kris flipped that on its head. You didn’t slow down to your brain, he said. You sped your reality up until it finally caught up to how fast your brain was already running.

Then you come home. The noise drops. Life goes quiet. And that’s when it falls apart.

I lived this one. After years of deployments, I ended up at a desk for the first time, and I lost it — the most ungodly panic attack of my life. I’m not a runner, and I took off running like Forrest Gump just to burn it off.

For a lot of people, the crash doesn’t show up the week they get home. It shows up two or three years later, once everything is supposed to be back to normal. If you don’t see it coming, you’ll think something is wrong with you. There isn’t. Your system is doing exactly what an overrun system does.

You Don’t Cure It. You Learn to Carry It.

Kris doesn’t sugarcoat the long game. In behavioral health, there’s no Z-Pak. You don’t take a pill and walk away cured the way you would with strep throat.

It’s a healing process, and that word matters. Healing means you are an active participant in your own recovery. Nobody hands it to you.

There’s also a trap on this road, and Kris and I both fell into it at one point. You can start to identify with the wound. The grumpy veteran. The guy with the bad past. You wrap yourself in it because it feels like the last piece of control you’ve got. But letting the trauma become your identity doesn’t shrink it — it just hands it the wheel.

The better path is to treat it for what it is: an injury to be managed with the right tools. And there are a lot of tools — talk therapy, CBT, EMDR, and more. The trick is matching the right tool to the right job, and finding the right fit for you.

Operation Field Trip

This is where Kris’s work comes in, and it’s worth its own spotlight.

Operation Field Trip is the organization Kris founded to get veterans and first responders into care — the people who’ve carried the heaviest loads and are often the last to ask for help. The program centers on ketamine therapy, delivered in Florida, as one of the tools that can help the brain do the healing work it needs to do.

Cost is one of the biggest reasons people never get through the door, so it’s worth being plain about it. Kris told me it runs roughly $5,000 to put one person through a full treatment cycle. Operation Field Trip works to remove that barrier and helps people in any way it can. The organization runs on donations, and every dollar goes toward getting another veteran or first responder the care they’ve earned.

You can learn more, reach the team, or donate through Kris’s website at t1rx.com or by phone at 877-GET-T1RX.

A quick note: this article and the episode are meant to inform and point you in a direction — not to serve as medical advice. If you’re working through any of this, talk with a qualified professional about what’s right for your situation.

Build the Resilience Layer Into Your Plan

Around here, the formula is Mindset × Ability = Capability. Resilience fits that formula exactly. It isn’t something you find in the rubble after a hard event. It’s a capability you build before you need it—same as any other skill on your list.

So put the aftermath on the list. Right next to beans, bullets, and band-aids, make room for the right-of-bang layer. Know that the crash can come late. Know that you can’t willpower it to not happen. And know what tools exist and where to turn before the day you need them.

Surviving the incident is the first half. Surviving the aftermath is the rest of it.

Listen to the Full Conversation

Kris and I cover a lot more in this one—grounding tools that work when your reality outruns you, the half of stoicism most people skip, a plain-English look at how the brain heals, and even why modern body armor is tied to an increase in PTSD.

It’s one of the more honest conversations I’ve had on the show. Give it a listen:

And if Kris’s mission speaks to you, take two minutes to look at Operation Field Trip.

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